|
dbae has asked for the wisdom of the Perl Monks concerning the following question:
When I use perldoc, I get many characters like this ESC[1m
with many variants. This happens, for example, when I type
perldoc perldoc to the Unix command line, making the output unreadable. I checked the output of perldoc perldoc by piping in Unix to a hexdump program, and it really is outputting Escape [ 1 m.
Could someone please tell me the name of this type of encoding, so I could check out what perldoc is trying to say to me?
I run MacOsX 10.6.8 and my version of perl is downloaded from Macports. perl --version gives:
perl 5, version 12, subversion 3 (v5.12.3) built for darwin-multi-2level.
Can I fix my perldoc problem a) in MacOsX b) in perl?
Is this a MacOsX problem or a perldoc problem? |
Re: strange output characters from perldoc
by MidLifeXis (Monsignor) on Apr 30, 2012 at 13:08 UTC
|
Try an echo $TERM at the same console, and see what pops out. My guess is that it is set to something that understands escape sequences (for bold, underline, colors, etc), but your terminal is not configured to understand those sequences.
By default (IIRC), unless your system is Windows, perl tries to use pod2man to format its output. The nroff program is then used to format the output as necessary to display on the type of terminal identified in the $TERM environment variable. If the variable and your current terminal capabilities do not match, you can see the output you are describing. Does man cat also display those escape sequences?
| [reply]
[d/l]
[select] |
Re: strange output characters from perldoc
by roboticus (Chancellor) on Apr 30, 2012 at 13:33 UTC
|
dbae:
The previous posters are correct. Having said that, you might look at your shell initialization script: I'm guessing that it's setting your TERM variable to something incompatible with your command console. Many *nix programs will read the TERM variable to determine what features it can use to format your output better. However, if it's set to something incompatible with your terminal program, you'll get exactly the situation you describe. Be sure to check that your terminal software has enough features, too. If you want color, boldface, underlines, etc., be sure you use a program that handles it.
The documentation for your terminal software should tell you enough information to figure out what the correct TERM value should be. (Though it may be overly cryptic, or not stated directly enough.) For example, the terminal I'm using here at work is mintty, and in the documentation it mentions:
Terminal emulation settings.
Type (Term=xterm)
The terminal type. This determines the setting of the TERM environment variable at mintty startup. Choices available from the dropdown
list are xterm, xterm-256color, xterm-vt220, vt220, and vt100.
If the setting contains "vt220", xterm VT220-style function key mode is enabled instead of the default PC-style function key mode.
(This can otherwise be set with the DECSET 1061 control sequence.)
Apart from that, this setting has no effect on mintty's terminal emulation, i.e. all the features are always available. However, the
TERM setting does tell applications what features they can use.
The xterm-256color setting enables 256-color mode in some applications, but may not be recognised at all by others, which is why plain
xterm is the default.
So on my setup, I'm using TERM=xterm (I would have added it to my .bashrc script, except that mintty defaults to setting the value for me.)
...roboticus
When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.
| [reply]
[d/l] |
|
|
echo $TERM gave me xterm-color, so I set it to xterm, but no change to output from perldoc perldoc resulted. I'm stuck between not knowing enough *n*x and not knowing enough MacOsX. MacOsX has an entirely non-*n*x way of setting properties of the terminal emulator given by the MacOsX program Terminal, but one can also affect things in the usual *n*x way. I haven't been able to find anything in MacOsX saying "set the properties of the terminal emulator to vt220", or anything similar. However, I don't have the time to go into it all, so I'm just going to leave matters in their current unsatisfactory state. At least, using the advice given here, I now have several ways of reading the output from perldoc, and also perdoc.org, and this has improved my relationship with perl. Thanks to everyone for this.
| [reply]
[d/l] |
|
|
Perhaps OS X Terminal Emulation Woes might be handy? If not, you might look to see if you can download a copy of RXVT or similar.
...roboticus
When your only tool is a hammer, all problems look like your thumb.
| [reply] |
|
|
$ echo %os%
Windows_NT
$ echo %term%
dumb
| [reply]
[d/l] |
Re: strange output characters from perldoc
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 30, 2012 at 09:43 UTC
|
| [reply] |
|
|
-o text works well. Thanks
| [reply] |
Re: strange output characters from perldoc
by Anonymous Monk on Apr 30, 2012 at 11:27 UTC
|
These are ANSI escape codes. Your terminal should interpret them to make text appear bold, underlined, etc. | [reply] |
Re: strange output characters from perldoc
by erix (Prior) on Apr 30, 2012 at 16:33 UTC
|
perldoc -tT perldoc | gvim - # or whatever reader/file
| [reply]
[d/l] |
Re: strange output characters from perldoc
by kcott (Archbishop) on May 01, 2012 at 03:45 UTC
|
G'day dbae,
I have the same problem using Mac OS X 10.7.3 and Perl 5.14.2 with the Mac application Terminal. I've used a number of different OSes over the years and haven't seen this issue previously: this suggests a Mac OS X problem; although, it could be related to just the perldoc implementation on Mac OS X.
I use ANSI escape codes in $PS1 and $PS2 and these seem to work perfectly. From my .bash_profile:
PS1='\[\033[0;36m\]\u@\h: \w\n\$ \[\033[0m\]'
PS2='\[\033[0;36m\]> \[\033[0m\]'
While fixing this is on my TODO list, it has a fairly low priority as I tend to use http://perldoc.perl.org in preference to the commandline perldoc. Looking for a quick fix some months ago, I investigated $TERM values (suggested above) as well as $LANG and $LC_* (locale) values. I didn't find a solution in whatever timeframe I allotted but these are areas I would be researching further in the future: perhaps that's of some use to you.
| [reply]
[d/l]
[select] |
|
|
Try looking at your PAGER environment variable. Mine was set to "more" and it was messing up from the output from perldoc (although normal "man" worked fine). I switched PAGER to be "less -R" and now perldoc looks good.
This is using xterm on FreeBSD, FWIW.
| [reply] |
|
|
| [reply]
[d/l]
[select] |
|
|
Perfect. This solved my problem too! My term was xterm-256color and man worked fine, although perldoc had escape sequences just like described here.
setting my PAGER to less -R solved it for me!!! Thank you!!
| [reply] |
|
|
although, it could be related to just the perldoc implementation on Mac OS X. No, no it couldn't, see for yourself
| [reply] |
|
|
